


Heat Lightning

by Leah_Red



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Crossover, Crossworks2020, Gen, God I hope so, Thor and Shiro would have broflirt if i had any balls, is this enough of the avengers to count
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 12:07:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25969414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leah_Red/pseuds/Leah_Red
Summary: With a corrupted portal launching them further than they've ever been before, Shiro has to find a way to get the crew back home with the help from an unexpected source.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 24
Collections: Crossworks 2020





	Heat Lightning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kiyuo_Honoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyuo_Honoo/gifts).



> What is canon? I have no idea. Have fun, nerd <3

Shiro winced at the sound of metal scraping on metal, leaning into the controls as he tried to steer the black lion away from the castle. A Galra ambush had taken them by surprise and the enemy ships were too small, fast, and spread apart for Voltron to be of much use.

“You’ve gotta get us out of here!” Lance shouted through the coms. Whether he was talking to his teammates or Allura in the castle was anybody’s guess.

“We’re working on it,” Allura assured him. “We just need a few more minutes to finish routing power to open up a wormhole-” Her voice was cut off abruptly with the sound of an explosion.

“Allura? Allura!” Shiro pulled up coordinates of the other lions scattered around the castle. They were too far apart to support each other, even as the blue flickering light of a wormhole started to form.

“Everybody inside the force field! Protect the bridge!” Shiro knew that their only hope to escape was to through that gate. If they could regroup-

A shock wave slammed the black lion into the side of the ship. The last thing he saw through the flickering displays were the dizzying lights of the tear in space before his lion powered down.

*

The first thing Shiro noticed when he climbed out of his lion was the atmosphere. Literally. The air was the most comfortable and natural thing he had breathed in since he had been taken from his mission on Pluto’s moon. There was no way Allura had sent them all the way back to Earth… was there?

Looking around, he saw the other lions crashed in various poses around him, huge swathes of the forest around knocked down around them. There was no sign of the castle, but at least the rest of the paladins ended up in the same place.

“Everybody okay out there?” Shiro asked through the headset in his helmet. It took a few moments, but the rest of them answered with various affirmative groans. “Stay with your lions. I’m going to see if I can get a lay of the land.” 

Nobody volunteered to go with him, so Shiro assumed he had made it out the least beat up from the crash landings. With a few jumps, assisted by the boosters in his armor, Shiro made it to the top of the black lion. What he saw took his breath away.

They _were_ back on Earth. Right in the middle of New York City. In Central Park, if his hunch was right. The noonday sun shone off of the skyscraper windows, though the light was oddly tinted blue. Above them and already disappearing were the last traces of the wormhole that had dumped them there. So much for an easy way back.

“Okay, I’ve got good news and bad news,” Shiro started to tell his crew. 

“Great. What’s the good news?” Hunk waved from the crater his yellow lion was in. “Are we really where I think we are?” he asked while the lion slowly righted herself. 

“Yeah. Back on Earth and right in the Big Apple.” Shiro felt the hair on the back of his head start to raise. Something was speeding through the air in their direction. “The bad news is that I think the castle isn’t anywhere near here. We might be stranded.”

Whatever was coming towards them was only getting faster. Shiro did his best to get a better view and magnify it through his helmet’s visor, but all he could get was that it was red and gold and _maybe_ shaped like a person?

“Something is headed our way,” Keith warned. “Red is picking up a lot of old-school heavy weaponry but it’s nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Even while he was still standing on top of her, the black lion slowly got to her feet. Shiro could tell she was ready to fight if needed. 

“Everybody stand down,” he demanded, both to the other pilots and their mechanical lions. “We don’t need to start any fights on our own planet.”

Shiro kept his stance neutral as the figure finally flew to a stop in front of him, buffeting him with hot air in an obvious attempt to intimidate him or knock him off balance. It was finally obvious that this was person-shaped; a set of armor completely covering whoever was in front of him. 

“Any of you care to tell me what the hell is going on here?” A man’s voice, that sounded more annoyed than anything else. “I need to know if I can call off Underoos and Captain Puerto Rico.”

“Is that supposed to mean something?” Pidge whispered through the headset. 

“No idea,” Shiro mumbled back. Louder, he said, “We’re the pilots of these mechanical lions. Our transport gate took us to the wrong place.” Something about this was setting off alarm bells in his head. Who was this person supposed to be? Why were they taking charge of a situation with obvious alien weaponry involved? And what was that building with the giant “A” logo on it? Were they… not back on their Earth?

Shiro did his best to calm his lion. The flying man, or machine, or whatever he was, was running some sort of scan or diagnostic on her. The black lion blocked it easily but it still made her uneasy.

“Is there someone in charge around here that we can speak to? Maybe find a place to let our lions repair themselves before we try to get back home?” he asked, doing his best to stay diplomatic.

Before the mechanical man could answer, Shiro heard Pidge gasp. “Is that Spider-Girl?!”

“We’re on Earth, not in a comic book,” Hunk reprimanded.

“No, look!” Despite Shiro’s earlier direction, Pidge dropped down into the green lion and bounded up next to Shiro and Black. She sent an alert through his helmet’s visor that outlined somebody swinging on nearly invisible ropes towards them. They launched off the closest skyscraper to land right at the foot of the two lions.

Pidge emerged from her lion’s opened mouth. “It _is_ Spider-Girl!”

“It’s Spider- _Man!_ Why does everyone get that wrong!?” A young, distinctly masculine voice shouted at them from the ground.

Shiro looked between Pidge and the red-and-blue jumpsuited _man_ below him. 

“Wait! Do you know what this must mean?” Lance approached much more slowly in the blue lion, still staying back. “When we tried to go through the portal, something must have really fucked up -”

“Language,” Hunk interrupted.

“Something must have _messed_ up and we ended up in an alternate universe. Where Spider-Girl -”

Pidge cut him off. “Spider- _Man.”_

“Whatever, we’re in a comic book world!” Lance blurted out, in a rush before someone else stopped him.

Shiro opened his mouth to tell Lance to stop joking around until Pidge sent him a file of illustrations from comic books. There was one that matched almost exactly to this Spider-Man; someone that looked suspiciously like the flying man named Cuprum. Before he could look through anything more, Copper Man interrupted him.

“As much as I would like to hash it out here in Central Park, it would probably be best to get these giant house cats out of here.” 

Lance huffed at the accusation of the lions being _house cats,_ but when they were sent a set of coordinates somewhere in Upstate New York, he was one of the first to coax his lion into the air.

The short distance was trivial to the paladins, who were used to flying through interstellar space. They easily made it to the designated coordinates in just a few minutes. And because because Keith and Lance made a competition out of it, because they always made a competition out of it, they were at the compound first, out of their lions and speaking with a man in a red and black suit, with a matching helmet under his arm.

“So, they’re big cats right?” the man asked. 

“The best big cats,” Lance boasted. He leaned against the blue lion’s paw with a smug look on his face.

“Do you think they might like some appropriately sized pats?”

“Unless you can manage to find _another_ giant robot other than ours, I think they’ll be out of luck,” Shiro said as he joined them.

“You sure about that?” He put on his helmet, and now Shiro could see the strangely insect-like design. After taking a few steps back he closed one of his hands into a fist and – 

“Whoa!” All three of the paladins flinched back. At the peripheral of his vision, Shiro could just barely see Hunk and Pidge dodging out of the way as this man grew in size until he was towering over the parked lions.

“Aww, they’re kind of cute now.” The giant man leaned down and carefully pat the red lion between her ears. Was Shiro imagining things or did the lion lean up into his touch? He did the same to the blue lion before shrinking back down to his previous size.

“Don’t tell Tony I did that,” he said in a faux whisper, taking off his helmet. “Name’s Scott. And you all are…” He looked around with his eyebrows raised. “A bunch of kids.”

Pidge crossed her arms and opened her mouth to say something before Shiro stepped in. “Age ranges vary,” he said quickly, “but I think we’re all old enough to not need a babysitter.”

“Good enough for me.” Scott shrugged. “Well I’m not sure how you beat him here, but I’ve been given the go-ahead to let you inside until you can make your way back to wherever you came from.”

Scott waved them to the large building, something that resembled a warehouse from the outside. Inside, they were immediately hit with an acrid, chemical scent that made Shiro’s nose wrinkle up. From within a cloud of smoke, two figures appeared, coughing and gasping. 

“I _told_ you the difference between voltage and amperage,” berated the first one, a man in a loose (and now stained with soot) hoodie. He pulled off his glasses and finally managed to clear his throat as he cleaned them off.

_”Voltage _and _amperage,”_ scoffed the other man, blond and somehow looking much more dignified even though he was in the same style of street clothes. His accent was… unusual, to say the least. “You wanted power, and lots of it, and that is what I gave you!”__

__“You two aren’t gonna cause any more property damage, are you?” Scott interrupted, hitting a button near the door they just came through that turned on a large set of fans._ _

__“No!” they answered in unison. Shiro was instantly reminded of Lance and Keith, but kept his mouth shut as a wry grin worked its way across his face._ _

__The two finally turned to the group, both of them trying to look like they hadn’t been caught doing something they shouldn’t have._ _

__“Who are these… strangely dressed children?” asked the blond man._ _

__Shiro stepped forward first to introduce the paladins. “We’re the Paladins of Voltron,” he announced, doing his best to ignore the way Hunk held back Pidge from starting a fight. “My name is Shiro, and this is my crew. We were told to come here until we can find out a way to get back to our… universe?” He only faltered at the end, looking back at the others who shrugged._ _

__“Nice to meet you,” said the man in the glasses. “I’m Bruce, and this is Thor. An alternate universe, you said?”_ _

__“That’s what we think, yeah,” Pidge said, still sullen about being called a child. “We were trying to travel through a wormhole and something malfunctioned. And we ended up in Central Park. Did you say his name was _Thor?”__ _

__Shiro was about to let them continue to chat when something from the conversation caught his attention. He moved over to the blond man who Bruce claimed was named Thor. Shiro found it a little odd but who was he to judge; one of his crew members was one syllable away from being named after a bird._ _

__Pidge, Hunk, and Bruce were still speaking about increasingly complicated science topics. Thor had an expression that Shiro could only say meant, ‘my body is present, but my mind is not.’ When he spoke to him, it seemed to snap him out of a bit of a daze._ _

__“So what was that about power?”_ _

__*_ _

__Ten minutes later, Thor and Shiro were standing outside underneath the blue lion._ _

__“This lion once made a wormhole that took us farther across the universe than humans had even discovered,” Shiro said, unable to keep a little bit of a boast out of his voice. “If we can boost her power and create another wormhole, we might be able to force a way back to our own universe.” It was a bit of a stretch. He knew the wormholes were supposed to just be powered by Allura’s link to the castle, but they had to try _something,_ right?_ _

__“A different universe. Interesting.” Thor rested a hand on the lion’s paw and a soft growl echoed through the air. The display didn’t intimidate him and Shiro couldn’t help but be just a little impressed when it just brought a grin to his face. “A fine animal! I think perhaps I _can_ help you out.”_ _

__Shiro ran through his rough plan with Thor before discretely calling Lance out with a whisper through the com in his helmet. When Lance, and presumably the blue lion through her connection with him, heard the plan, no one had any objections._ _

__“As long as you promise that it won’t hurt her, I think we might as well. What do we have to lose?” Lance looked up at his lion. “What do you think, Blue?”_ _

__This time she got to her feet and let out a roar, shaking the air._ _

__“Well, no time like the present!” Lance hopped into Blue’s mouth as soon as she leaned down to scoop him up. “Let’s do this before somebody smarter tries to stop us!”_ _

__Shiro moved away from the lion, just in case Thor’s lightning powers wanted to arc over to him. The self-proclaimed god gave him a thumbs up as his eyes started to glow bright blue. Electricity fizzed and gathered around his hands while the faint echo of thunder came from the clear sky._ _

__Thunder drummed closer, and closer, until Shiro was almost deafened when one final lightning bolt burst out of nothing and struck the blue lion with a flash that seared his vision away for more than a few seconds._ _

__“What are you guys doing out here?!” Hunk pulled Shiro to his feet, who hadn’t even realized he had been knocked back by the lightning until he was hauled back up again._ _

__“And what happened to Blue!” Pidge was pointing at the lion. Her expression was a cross between curiosity and fear, and Shiro could tell why. The lion was surrounded by sparks and her yellow eyes were beaming bright enough to act as spotlights._ _

__Shiro shook off Hunk’s arm and stood on his own while doing his best to ignore the stinging and twitching in his prosthetic arm. “Get to your lions! If this works, we only have one shot.”_ _

__Hunk and Pidge exchanged a look, but when Shiro kept his glare on them, they quickly donned their helmets and ran off. Only then did Shiro make his way to Black._ _

__“How you doing, Lance?” he asked as he settled into the cockpit._ _

__“Tingly. I think Blue liked it! Ready to go, bud?” With the ridiculous volume of the lion’s roar, Shiro hoped that there were no sensitive instruments inside the compound. “All right! Here we go!”_ _

__With that, the blue lion let out another ear-splitting roar. This time it wasn’t just for show. Blue sparks appeared in the air and coalesced into a bright sphere before exploding outwards. The runes and shapes on the outside of the wormhole glowed like bar sign neon._ _

__“Your move, Thor,” Shiro murmured. He was still practically right between Blue’s front paws. What was he waiting for?_ _

__Shiro felt an abrupt sense of loss when the power in his lion shorted out, only to boot up immediately after. Was the disorientation he felt his own, or his mechanical partners? He shook it off the best he could when he saw that the blue portal was flickering a sickly purple._ _

__“What the hell are you doing out here?!” Bruce was berating Thor, who had been thrown back from the lion and portal and left a hefty dent in the side of the building. The two men argued – at least Thor seemed unharmed, from the way he pulled himself out of the minor wreckage – as Shiro pulled the black lion into the air._ _

__“Follow me. Stay close.” Shiro looked at his teammates through the screens in front of him until they all nodded. With that, they flew through the corrupted portal and -_ _

__Shiro winced at the sound of metal scraping on metal, leaning into the controls as he tried to steer the black lion away from the castle. A Galra ambush had taken them by surprise and the enemy ships were too small, fast, and spread apart for Voltron to be of much use._ _

__“You’ve gotta get us out of here!” Lance shouted through the coms. Whether he was talking to his teammates or Allura in the castle was anybody’s guess._ _

__“We’re working on it,” Allura assured him. “We just need a few more moments to finish routing power to open up a wormhole- There!”_ _

__The blue portal opened up in front of the castle like it had dozens, hundreds of times before. With the castle making its way through, Shiro and Keith kept their lions at the rear to guard their exit._ _

__“That was a close one,” Keith admitted to Shiro. “I don’t know what would have happened if we didn’t make it out of there.”_ _

__“But we did, and that’s what matters. We’ll find someplace to regroup and repair, and next time they won’t get us so easily.” Shiro sat back in his pilots’ seat and sighed. The sooner they got somewhere safe, the better._ _


End file.
